We have domesticated God's transcendence. We often learn about God at about the same time as we are learning about Santa Claus but our ideas about Santa Claus change, mature and become more nuanced, w...
لم يكن الطقس الطقوس الدينية في العالم قبل الحديث نتاج أفكار دينية بل على النقيض فقد كانت الأفكار نتاج الطقوس
The moral and spiritual imperatives of religion are important for humanity and should not be relegated unthinkingly to the scrap heap of history in the interests of an unfettered rationalism.
But was the prototype of human existence; it was the original pattern or the archetype on which our life here below had been modeled.
When John Robinson, Bishop of Woolwich, published Honest to God in 1963, stating that he could no longer subscribe to the old personal God out there, there was uproar in Britain. A similar furor has g...
We should probably all pause to confront our past from time to time, because it changes its meaning as our circumstances alter.
We are, the great spiritual writers insist, most fully ourselves when we give ourselves away, and it is egotism that holds us back from that transcendent experience that has been called God, Nirvana,...
To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself to us as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive...
They were weary of the chaos inflicted by the Roman-Persian wars and longed for the peace that only an autocratic empire seemed able to provide.
There is a distinction between belief in a set of propositions and a faith which enables us to put our trust in them.
Theism is so confused and the sentences in which ‘God’ appears so incoherent and so incapable of verifiability or falsifiability that to speak of belief or unbelief, faith or unfaith, is logically imp...
Their revered minister John Cotton had instructed them that they could attack the natives without provocation—a procedure normally unlawful—because they had not only a natural right to their territory...
The principle of charity and the science of compassion are both crucial to any attempt to understand discourse and ideas that initially seem baffling, distressing, and alien;
The word qur’an means recitation. It was not designed for private perusal, but like most scriptures, it was meant to be read aloud, and the sound was an essential part of the sense. Poetry was importa...
The problem of predestination and free will, which has also exercised Christians, indicates a central difficulty in the idea of a personal God. An impersonal God, such as Brahman, can more easily be s...
The philosopher Karl Popper (1902–94) often remarked We don’t know anything and believed that this was the most important philosophical truth.16
The new Sufi tariqahs founded at this time stressed the unlimited potential of human life. Sufis could experience on the spiritual plane what the Mongols had so nearly achieved in terrestrial politics
The guilt and anxiety induced by hunting, combined with frustration resulting from ritual celibacy, could have been projected onto the image of a powerful woman, who demands endless bloodshed.27 The h...
The Socratic dialogue was a spiritual exercise designed to produce a profound psychological change in the participants, and because its purpose was that each person should understand the depth of his...
The Qur’an was attempting to give women a legal status that most Western women would not enjoy until the nineteenth century. The